Assange Vs Takky

[robaus]

From what I read about the case, there was correspondence between Assange and Bradley Manning before, during and after the material was handed over, and Assange may have actively encouraged him to pass it on in order to be published and possibly to even go download more of it. Manning faces charges that include espionage and "aiding the enemy" (treason in other words) against him, so if there is evidence Assange was actively involved in it, then he probably could face fairly serious charges in the US, as a co-conspirator. Honestly I don't think the US would bother to extradite him, especially if he gets convicted of sex charges in Sweden.

 

Side note, the claims that his attorneys are seeking a promise he wouldn't be extradited to the US since the death penalty is in effect there are hyperbolic noise. No one has faced the death penalty for spying since the Rosenbergs (1950s--for giving the bomb to the soviets, no less), and only then with big controversy. They're not seeking the death penalty for Manning, so it would be bizarre if they did for Assange. Just hyperbolic noise.

 

 

When a government or its agents do something illegal, are you saying its right to cover that up at all costs, and if someone exposes it, silence them with a charge of espionage. I think there's a greater public good than the statutes of a morally corrupt government.

 

If we'd had the internet and Wikileaks in the 1940s would it have been right or wrong to expose Hitler's plans for genocide?

 

If you have any doubts that this is not a setup by hypocritical governments to silence Julian Assange, view this doco made by Australian Broadcasting Corporations Four Corners, a highly reputable Australian investigative journalism programme on a par with UK's Panorama and World in Action.

 

 

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/07/19/3549280.htm

 

>>Honestly I don't think the US would bother to extradite him, especially if he gets convicted of sex charges in Sweden.

 

..there's already a US grand jury indictment waiting to do exactly that the moment Assange steps foot in Sweden. View the documentary to hear the other side of the story.

 

[kamui]

>>Honestly I don't think the US would bother to extradite him, especially if he gets convicted of sex charges in Sweden.

 

..there's already a US grand jury indictment waiting to do exactly that the moment Assange steps foot in Sweden. View the documentary to hear the other side of the story.

 

 

Rolling Stone magazine reported that the USA has a sealed (i. e. secret) indictment against Assange. The US authorities of course haven't commented on this. Link

 

Anyway, anybody would be very stupid to trust the USA, with its history of "extraordinary rendition", torture, e.g.

[Wallenda]

When a government or its agents do something illegal, are you saying its right to cover that up at all costs, and if someone exposes it, silence them with a charge of espionage. I think there's a greater public good than the statutes of a morally corrupt government.

 

 

 

I'll try to check out the doc, thanks.

 

Regardless what I think of the question you pose, I think the pertinent question here is whether or not governments can legally keep condidential information. On this question, in any country the answer is yes, and there are laws to protect it. Manning and Wikileaks may have what they perceive to be a moral right to do what they do, but the problem for them is that it also happens to be illegal. They knew this, they took the risk, here's the result. If they or anyone want it otherwise, that would mean getting legislation passed to make confidential information by governments illegal. (I can't see anyone in Wikileaks undertaking something that's as much work as that, it's not their style.)

 

As for what will happen if Assange lands in Sweden, you could be right or you could be wrong, we'll only get to find out if it has a chance to play itself out. My gut says he wouldn't be extradited to the US, but on the other hand it wouldn't shock me if it did happen.

 

Had someone investigated incidents that were illegal and reported it, that to me is a very different thing. To me that is easy to support, regardless which country the perpetrators came from. When they're just publishing confidential files illegally, and as indiscriminately as this was done, and irresponsibly (publishing names of informants), then it becomes much more morally ambiguous, to me at least. I mean, the leaks exposed some terrible incidents, that's correct. But that doesn't change the fact that the leaks were illegal, it doesn't exempt them from laws they broke.

 

I also can't get past that these guys are hackers, information thieves, who've decided to make this their main pursuit in life. Their only expertise is in an activity that's criminal. So I think anyone looking to Assange or others as any kind of moral compasses is on pretty thin ice. Good people don't become interested with invading other people's privacy and breaking into things. This is the same community that steals identities and credit card numbers, and creates viruses. Medgar Evers they're not.

[kamui]

Had someone investigated incidents that were illegal and reported it, that to me is a very different thing. To me that is easy to support, regardless which country the perpetrators came from. When they're just publishing confidential files illegally, and as indiscriminately as this was done, and irresponsibly (publishing names of informants), then it becomes much more morally ambiguous, to me at least. I mean, the leaks exposed some terrible incidents, that's correct. But that doesn't change the fact that the leaks were illegal, it doesn't exempt them from laws they broke.

 

 

One of the major coups of Wikileaks was the video of the murder of Iraqi civilians (including Reuters journalist and his driver) by combat helicopter.

They also wounded a father and two children driving by the scene who arrived _after_ the shooting. The father was picking up a wounded man, when the heli crew shot the him and another helper and several times at the van. After the ground troops found the kids (the vehicle of the ground troops drover over a body by the way) on crewman says: "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."

I guess the video is one of the best example why the US lost the Iraq.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

[robaus]

You generalise that all hackers must per se be bad, and that anything the US government does must per se be good.

 

All the things you have accused Wikileaks of doing, have also been done by US govt agencies..illegal invasion of privacy (Watergate), exposure of its own informants (Valerie Plame). Wikileaks actually goes to great extents to redact documents not to expose informants, but is sometimes thwarted by the Pentagon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_War_documents_leak#Informants_named

 

Your argument rests on the assumption that all governments, even democratically elected ones, never do anything illegal, corrupt or evil.

 

It must be a very long list of world leaders once recognised by the US, UK, Australia and the other western allies as heads of legitimate governments and friends even, but who are now held in contempt as tyrants.

 

Stalin

Hitler

Pol Pot

Mobutu

Mugabe

Gaddafi

Saddam Hussein

Assad

..to name a few.

 

It all depends who gets to write history. Wikileaks cuts through all the hypocrisy.

 

Who knows how many lives would have been saved if Wikileaks had been around at the time of the Gallipoli campaign cockup or when an incompetent toff sitting in a tree miles behind the lines was directing operations with a broken telephone line at the Battle of the Somme keeping a cricket score on how many 1000s of men were being slaughtered per yards gained, or Churchill allowing the Lusitania to be torpedoed, or Hitler planning genocide, or coded messages about the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor being ignored..deliberately?? If only Wikileaks had been able to expose Bushit, poodles Blair and Howard's conning us with false information to start a futile war in Iraq looking for non existent WMD.

 

Don't forget that in a democracy we are not sheep; we are the bosses.

 

[panadolsandwich]

Don't forget that in a democracy we are not sheep; we are the bosses.

 

 

So you don't feel like a sheep when you tick a box every four years? (Probably someone you wouldn't piss on if on fire, but still, you can entertain a choice). Then let the real people take back control. Unless that was sarcastic - I would have to award that the most laughably naive comment of 2012 - and the year hasn't finished yet lol.

 

I'll give you a hint, they call it democracy.

[Coss]

That's my take on the Lao system. One party, but they get to choose which candidate they vote for, i.e. there are multiple candidates for each position.

 

In NZ there are multiple parties as well, but the pool of politicians is more or less confined to people that as you say "you wouldn't piss on if on fire" so I don't see much difference (in the system). Vast differences in the policies of course.

[robaus]

So you don't feel like a sheep when you tick a box every four years? (Probably someone you wouldn't piss on if on fire, but still, you can entertain a choice). Then let the real people take back control. Unless that was sarcastic - I would have to award that the most laughably naive comment of 2012 - and the year hasn't finished yet lol.

 

I'll give you a hint, they call it democracy.

 

Q.E.D.

 

That's exactly why we need people like Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and why I support him...Baaaat others don't!

 

[Wallenda]

You generalise that all hackers must per se be bad, and that anything the US government does must per se be good.

No I didn't. The US govt has done plenty of terrible things, of course. Whether they have or not doesn't negate the fact that laws exist, and if the laws are violated, the perpetrators are still guilty of committing crimes. As for hackers being bad, unless you think no one has a right to privacy, hacking is wrong. Are you ok with strangers entering your computer and doing whatever they want with it? Regardless how you feel about that, it is illegal. Someone who identifies himself as a hacker is identifying himself as a person who engages in criminal activity. There's no way around that.

 

All the things you have accused Wikileaks of doing, have also been done by US govt agencies..illegal invasion of privacy (Watergate), exposure of its own informants (Valerie Plame). Wikileaks actually goes to great extents to redact documents not to expose informants, but is sometimes thwarted by the Pentagon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_War_documents_leak#Informants_named

True, and in those cases are recognized as dastardly acts. Nixon was forced to resign as president for what he did. Bush's approval rating sank to all-time presidential lows. About the redacting, actually Assange himself was strongly in favor of not omitting names of informants in leaked documents, even said something like "if they get killed as a result, they deserve it, they're informants". News stories that I saw said that while some names were blacked out, most were not.

 

Your argument rests on the assumption that all governments, even democratically elected ones, never do anything illegal, corrupt or evil.

Not at all, I don't even have an argument actually. I'm just acknowledging that what Manning did is illegal, and that hacking is illegal. There's nothing to argue about there, it's just true. Fact. Woodward & Bernstein are heroes to me. They didn't conduct break-ins of their own to research the Watergate story. Wikileaks on the other hand has more in common with Liddy and the rest.

 

It must be a very long list of world leaders once recognised by the US, UK, Australia and the other western allies as heads of legitimate governments and friends even, but who are now held in contempt as tyrants.

 

Stalin

Hitler

Pol Pot

Mobutu

Mugabe

Gaddafi

Saddam Hussein

Assad

..to name a few.

 

It all depends who gets to write history. Wikileaks cuts through all the hypocrisy.

 

Who knows how many lives would have been saved if Wikileaks had been around at the time of the Gallipoli campaign cockup or when an incompetent toff sitting in a tree miles behind the lines was directing operations with a broken telephone line at the Battle of the Somme keeping a cricket score on how many 1000s of men were being slaughtered per yards gained, or Churchill allowing the Lusitania to be torpedoed, or Hitler planning genocide, or coded messages about the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor being ignored..deliberately?? If only Wikileaks had been able to expose Bushit, poodles Blair and Howard's conning us with false information to start a futile war in Iraq looking for non existent WMD.

 

Don't forget that in a democracy we are not sheep; we are the bosses.

 

 

Maybe we can discuss this without spreading it out to all of human history, what do you say? ;-)

 

You seem to want a hero, I'm just saying, Assange doesn't deserve to be it, he hasn't worked with refugees or organized protests or visited rape victims in Darfur or anything else--he'd never bother with any of that. Not interested. He wants the glory without the work, without the sincere caring about issues. You seem to be on a track where you've learned that the US did some things that were bad and therefore you want a simplified understanding of things -- the US is bad so it follows then that Saddam and others actually weren't bad but were good...? I think it's not that simple. There's the inconvenient problem in Afghanistan that the Taliban commit atrocities that are worse than what the US military does there. They attack primary schools, throwing acid in the faces of little girls who study there; this past week they attacked a wedding party and 17 people beheaded for the unforgiveable crime of dancing at a wedding party. That doesn't mean soldiers deliberately targeting innocent civilians is good, no. It is possible to recognize both for what they are. I guess if you had a choice whether to live in a town controlled by the US government, like Seattle, or one controlled by the Taliban, it'd be pretty obvious where you would go.

[kamui]

No I didn't. The US govt has done plenty of terrible things, of course. Whether they have or not doesn't negate the fact that laws exist, and if the laws are violated, the perpetrators are still guilty of committing crimes. As for hackers being bad, unless you think no one has a right to privacy, hacking is wrong. Are you ok with strangers entering your computer and doing whatever they want with it? Regardless how you feel about that, it is illegal. Someone who identifies himself as a hacker is identifying himself as a person who engages in criminal activity. There's no way around that.

 

True, and in those cases are recognized as dastardly acts. Nixon was forced to resign as president for what he did. Bush's approval rating sank to all-time presidential lows. About the redacting, actually Assange himself was strongly in favor of not omitting names of informants in leaked documents, even said something like "if they get killed as a result, they deserve it, they're informants". News stories that I saw said that while some names were blacked out, most were not.

 

Not at all, I don't even have an argument actually. I'm just acknowledging that what Manning did is illegal, and that hacking is illegal. Woodward & Bernstein are heroes to me. They didn't conduct break-ins of their own to research the Watergate story. Wikileaks on the other hand has more in common with Liddy and the rest.

 

 

NO, hacking is not illegal per se. Hacking can be illegal, but if it is "White Hat" hacking it can be a very important tool to control the work of governments and corporations.

 

One of the most respected group of hackers in the world is the German "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC). They did and do spectacular hacks and publish them. Also they drive the discussion about freedom of data in a very important way, since they are the ones who really understand how governments around the world are destroying our rights of privacy, e.g..<

 

BBC Video: Chaos Computer Club hackers 'have a conscience'

 

The most recent hack by the CCC was to prove that the German government placed trojan software with illegal functions on PCs of several German citizens. Also they proved how easily the new German passport with a RIFD chip can be hacked.

 

The CCC supported Wikileaks until shortly before it's end when there was a major fall out between Assange and his German IT specialist who was a member of the CCC at that time.

 

Of course governments and corps want to declare any hacking illegal, since it undermines the aim to control the citizens/consumers.